Betsy DeVos' first year: a report card

One year ago, Betsy DeVos was confirmed as the Trump administration's first secretary of education following intense confirmation hearings. With a year under her belt, the first report card is in.

From proposed cuts in federal education investments and failed oversight of the laws that ensure educational equity across our country to the rollback of civil rights protections, it's clear that this administration's policies and values have had a deeply negative affect on our nation's most vulnerable schoolchildren, particularly low-income students and students of color.

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At the same time that the administration proposes spending $25 billion on a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, it has also proposed nearly $10 billion in direct cuts to K-12 and higher education programs.

This would mean the elimination of after-school programs, substantial cuts to career and technical education programs, reduced support for teacher preparation programs and a raid of $5 billion from the Pell Grant program's reserve fund that helps so many achieve their higher education dreams.

This slashing of education funding is compounded by the administration's proposed cuts to the social safety net that supports our nation's most vulnerable children and families. This includes more than $800 billion in cuts to Medicaid, Children's Health Insurance and Obamacare, as well as $193 billion in cuts to the SNAP food stamp program and drastic cuts to HUD's affordable housing programs. To put it more simply, these cuts matter to education because children can't learn if they aren't healthy, if they don't have a place to live or if they are hungry.

Instead of disinvesting in our education system and in our schoolchildren, DeVos should have ensured faithful state implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act — the federal education law intended to ensure that academic standards and assessments are the same for all students across our country.

Instead, in direct violation of what the law is meant to do, she approved a "menu" approach where schools will be rated according to different indices from a long list of possible options from which they can choose.

You can be sure that districts with poor student achievement outcomes overall or for specific racial and economic subgroups will gravitate toward options that mask those results. Meaningless standards and accountability mean funding will be misdirected away from schools that need it most — and who most often pays the price for this gaming of the system? Once again, low-income children and students of color.

In addition to failing to enforce federal educational guarantees under ESSA, DeVos also rolled back federal enforcement of civil-rights guarantees and sharply curtailed the regular practice of the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights to investigate civil-rights complaints for evidence of larger, systemic violations.

She also undercut protections against sexual abuse on college campuses and protections for transgender students, and is now reviewing guidance aimed at preventing discriminatory school discipline that contributes to the school-to-prison pipeline.

DeVos's first year has not been uniformly negative. We were glad to see that the administration's proposed budget maintained Title I funding generally, increased special education funding and also increased the appropriation to the federal Charter School Program.

We were also heartened when DeVos said that her "heart is with" the Dreamers, which of course is smart policy given that rescinding DACA would disrupt learning environments across all levels of the U.S. education system. Nearly 9,000 Dreamers are teachers who could be forced out of their classrooms, and there are an estimated 200,000 U.S.-citizen children whose parents have been protected under DACA that will live with increased fear for their parents' safety and may lose access to services if their parents fear deportation through interaction with governmental agencies, including those with teachers and school administrators.

With the deadline of March 5 looming on DACA, we are hopeful that DeVos will use her leverage in the administration to ensure the government's policy aligns with her expression of empathy.

While de Vos has taken a small handful of positive steps, her first year as secretary, coupled with the administration's broader policies affecting kids and families, has been broadly destructive to creating more equitable educational opportunities for our nation's most vulnerable schoolchildren. We hope year two might bring a dramatic change in this administration's education policies.